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I useFirefoxso most of these won’t apply to non-FF users. Gayunman, I’d be very very interested to hear what other addons my friends, subscribers, and random websurfers find interesting or useful to them. Have your say and let us know why you love the addons you love. 🙂

Personally, I prefer addons that aren’t intrusive. Ideally, an addon must have a minimal interface and give me a measurable benefit for me to keep it installed.

This neat and minimal addon tells you if the SSL certificate for the site you’re currently viewing is soon going to expire. If your own site has an SSL certificate, I recommend you use this addon to help avoid your site’s SSL certificate expiring due to a simple lack of notification or miscommunication.

Right now, I use this only for theGooglemonkeyR iskrip. This script reformatsGoogle‘s search results to your specifications and also has an option to show small thumbnail of the pages Google links to. Greasemonkey can do alotmore and there are plenty of scripts readilyavailablefor many many sites.

ShowIP (using a version modified for work purposes – displays company server’s canonical name when browsing) – 10

I cannot imagine the hell I’d have to go through to identify a server without this plugin. Okay, I can. Used to have to do this all the time. I eventually scripted it but I can’t find the original script. Here’s my 60-second attempt at recreating what was in that script:

I used this once to diagnose some issues with a page. I don’t do much web development so I’m going to remove this one. Its no comment on its capabilities since I believe this is a top notch add-onifyou’re doing a lot of web development work.

Some of you may already know that I built a home server not too long ago. I documented some of the very important parts of how it was built though I was planning on releasing all the documentation all at once. I was using Arch Linux and I hadn’t nearly finished everything, especially the documentation. Halimbawa, it was supposed to be a media server. After some disk shuffling, it was supposed to end up having aPagsalakay1for the boot andRAID 10for the rest (the media part).

I got as far as having an efficient (at mahusay–firewalled) routing gateway server. I was finally satisfied that the customised local routing* was working correctly and I was confident that my tests withDHCPmeant I could disable the DHCP service on the flimsyADSLrouter and have all myflatmatesstart using the server as the Internetgateway. Instead: I was logged in to the server from the office, I’d just installed Apache2**, and I was about to consult with a colleague regarding getting nice graphs put together so the flatmates could all see who was using up the bandwidth*** — when I noticed a little message indicating that the root filesystem had been remounted read-only due to some or other disk failure.

And then I lost my connection to the server.

And then I gained a foul mood.

🙁

When I arrived home, I found that, as I had guessed from the descriptive message given at the office, the (napaka) old 80GBIDEdisk that I was using for the root filesystem had failed. Unfortunately, the server would never boot again and there was little chance of prying everything off onto another disk to continue where I’d left off.

I’m buying a replacement (SATA) HDD this next weekend just after pay day – and I’ve changed my mind about documenting my progress… and backing up my configurations:

* ISPs in South Africa charge less (easy pricecomparison) for “local-only” (within South Africa) traffic on ADSL but only if you use an ADSL account that CANNOT access web services outside of South Africa. This means that if you want to take advantage of the reduced costs but still be able to access the Internet at large, you need to set up some sneaky routing.

** one-command-install: ~$ yaourt -S apache

*** Internet Access in SA is expensive – you get charged about R70 ($7 / £4.9 / €5.46) per GB when using ADSL, or about R2 per MB if using GPRS / 3G.